Economics and Manufacturing

[text] One of the main reason for the decline in goods in services in the United States, and to a lesser extent, the world, is the financialization of our economies driven by excessive money printing. Let's break that down into simpler language. The quality of the things and services

[text] This is going to sound dumb, but retail margins blow my mind. I'm so accustomed to selling a $20 item and eeking out a $4 or $5 profit (if we're lucky) after all the costs associated with ecommerce. We recently had the opportunity to sell our products at full retail prices

[image] I am not seeing a way for things to quickly return to normal. I have far from perfect information but it seems to me that it will take at least months to repair the oil and gas infrastructure which has been damaged. And that is if there is a cessation in military activities.

[image] USD quietly down 6% vs. the Chinese RMB in the last year. Unlike tariffs, this is difficult to cheat.

[text] “All our plastic suppliers are saying there's a 30-50% price increase. Because of war” Now add increased transportation on top. This isn’t like tariffs. Can’t lie about the value to reduce costs. It’s real.

[text] A year ago I wrote this article about how the April 2025 tariffs would fail. They did, resoundingly. It was arguably the worst US economic policy of all time. And the execution was even worse. If you opened a factory in the USA because of these tariffs, you are dead today.

[image] This is Cairo, Illinois. Geographically, it should be one of the richest cities in the United States. It lies at the confluence of America's two most important industrial and agricultural rivers, the Ohio and the Missississippi, and 3 states, Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky.

[video] The people who sew your clothing earn $200 to $300 per month and they don’t need electricity. It’s going to be a little while before $100,000 robots are even close to cost competitive, never mind that they lack the manual dexterity to sew.

[text] What does a world with less, pricier energy look like? - more bikes - fewer cars - more electric vehicles - less gas powered cars - more solar panels - more digital services / entertainment - fewer physical goods - more firewood - less travel - more video calls - less commuting

[image] If you want people to respect you, I don't recommend going into the toy business, even the educational toy business. What we do is not only extremely important for the skills of the next generation, but also extremely difficult. I've seen 100s of our competitors go down as we